There are plenty of these lists of things that make us happy bouncing around the Internet, but I was quite taken with this one, which I discovered today. It’s reasonably self-explanatory:
101 ways to feel happy by motivational writer Annabel Candy.
Also, do take a look at her seven reasons to go for a good walk. I quite agree.
The character Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is a good source of quotes on the subject of happiness. In the novel, Micawber, an eternal optomist in the employ of Uriah Heep, is repeatedly convinced that ‘something will turn up’. His name is, therefore, used to refer to someone who lives in constant expectation of a better life.
For example, in chapter 11, he says: ‘I have no doubt I shall, please Heaven, begin to be more beforehand with the world, and to live in a perfectly new manner, if -if, in short, anything turns up.’
A Dickens quote has even given rise to the ‘Micawber Principle’, based on the character’s following observation:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six. Result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six. Result misery.”
News broke this weekend that the British Museum is to work on a new museum for the United Arab Emirates. Saadiyat Island, a natural island along the coast of Abu Dhabi, will be home to the new Zayed National Museum, which will reflect the life and achievements of Sheikh Zayed (1918-2004) – a major player in the establishment of the federated UAE.
Unlike the Louvre and Guggenheim projects currently underway on the island, this will not be an outpost of the British Museum, rather a partnership project delivered in conjunction with the museum. The BM is acting in an advisory role as a consultant. There’s an article about the new Zayed National Museum on Museum [Insider].
I also had a piece published there last week about the work taking place in Bedford City centre as they begin an HLF-phase 1 project to link Bedford Museum with its neighbour the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery.
Lions, tigers and bears all used to live in the former Royal Surrey Zoological Gardens, just off the Walworth Road. Who knew?
Apparently Queen Victoria used to pop down there for a nosy at the animals, from time to time.
There’s a piece about the Lost Zoo of Southwark on Dulwich OnView.
James Naughtie started an interesting discussion on the Today programme this morning about the advantages of governments aiming to set policy that is in the interests of the well-being and happiness of the general public. I’ve written before about how David Cameron claimed, well before the recession began, that we shouldn’t be looking at GDP, but GWB – general well being. But Naughtie introduced some key thinkiers who are writing about this at the moment.
Richard Leyard (social scientist and economist) – claims that in 20 years we’ll be basing policy on the well-being and happiness of the people.
Michael Sandell (social scientist) – spoke at the Reith Lecture about the common good.
Iain Duncan-Smith (former Tory leader) – convinced that happiness is just as important for the left and the right in politics and that the current banking crisis gives us a chance to ask questions about the way we live our lives. Apparently we are deeply unhappy because our society is broken.
Will Wilkinson (Cato Institute, Washington) – suggests that the idea of contentment has to be reconciled by progress. On one hand we could all be Buddhists and remove all desire and wanting – and therefore remove ourselves from any potential disappointment. But on the other hand, he claims that while the ‘treadmill of striving’ causes a huge amount of anxiety it also drives progress and this should not, and cannot, be stopped. So his solution is to for us to find the balance between ambition and expectation. Simple.
Naughtie is off to Denmark tomorrow – where the people are said to be blissfully happy. I’ll be tuning in to find out their secret.
In the meantime, here’s the link to the Radio 4 website for this morning’s broadcast. And if you like, you can read James Naughtie’s accompanying article online.
With thanks to Nick Hopwood, who actually heard the piece!
Are we having fun yet?
Happy Families is a new BBC series looking at changes taking place in British society, examining how childhood and families have transformed over the last decade. But from the scramble to get into the best schools to the pressures on working parents, are we too stressed to be happy?
It was screened on Wednesday morning and is available to view on on iPlayer until Wednesday 29th July.
Hot on the tail of their Banksy exhibition promotions, the council-run museum service in Bristol is now set to open their new flagship Museum of Bristol in 2011. It’s housed in a reconditioned harbourside building in the emerging arts quarter of the city, not far from the SS Great Britain and the Arnolfini Gallery.
Read all about the plans and see lovely pictures of what’s going to be going on inside the build on Museum [Insider].
This morning’s Thought for the Day on Radio 4 was by the ever observant Rev. Angela Tilby, who was recounting a TV drama she saw recently, underlining the folly of chasing money in the pursuit of happiness.
Who end up happier? The city banker, the ruthless salesman or the security guard. Perhaps there’s a certain predictability about who ends up being happiest at the end of the story. But Angela Tilby astutely links the story to the book of Proverbs: ‘Riches do not profit in the day of wrath’ and ‘Better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be rich and crooked in one’s ways.’
And as she concludes: ‘The longing for the happiness that money promises is so embedded in our minds that we are in danger of falling into a new delusion. This week all kinds of lobby groups have argued for more money; all for good and necessary things. But the cash has run out, and deep down we know it. There is no one to blame, but ourselves, who believed that money was infinite, like God and all we had to do was want it. We are going to have to learn to be poor and to find our security from within.’
The full text of her broadcast is available here.
Quoted text, copyright BBC.
I’ve had a letter printed in the Summer 2009 edition of Museum Practice (MP) magazine. MP is the sister publication of Museums Journal (MJ), both of which are published by the Museums Association in the UK. While MJ is a monthly magazine devoted mainly to news, reviews and the strategic direction of the museum sector in this country, MP is a more reflective, quarterly publication which aims to highlight best practice across the sector and give lots of practical examples of work going on around the world.
My short letter was in response to a series of pieces in the Spring issue about technoligical advances in interpretive media in museums. I just wanted to make sure people were aware that while we are all keen to develop new and exciting means of interpreting museum objects for visitors, it’s important to bear their skills and needs in mind. And that it’s possible to quite easily and cheaply evaluate this with visitors.
If you’re a member of the Museums Association and have a log-in you can read the letter here.
We did some really straightforward, but incredibly worthwhile, formative evaluation of electronic media at the British Museum before I left there earlier this year. And now I’m freelance I’m still available to carry out evaluations using questionnaires, surveys, focus groups and observed visitor study sessions.
Do get in touch if you’d be interested in hearing about my work in this area.
I’ve been working with the British Museum of late, writing their new multimedia guide to the permanent collection – it’s like a traditional museum audio-guide, but it has a screen as well so you can show images and have visitors click on little interactives and games. It’s been great fun, but a bit of a learning curve for me as I was previously used to writing pure audio. I find that the more gudies I take, the better my writing becomes. I’ve really enjoyed making little interactives – click on the screen to find out more about ……
Recently I’ve taken some good tours. The Imperial War Museum multimedia tour is great and has loads of content on there for families especially. And the tour for the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery was brilliant – it really got me looking closely at the paintings and comaring them to works in other museums being shown to me on my screen. One of the golden rules of audio writing for museums is don’t write about what you can’t see, but with this you can!
I’m now working on a tour of the Parthenon galleries at the British Museum for visually impaired visitors, which is a real challenge, but great fun. I’m having to come up with as many different ways of saying – the object infront of you is made of pale grey marble. It all goes live in December, once it’s been translated into nine languages!
The professional museum sector in the UK is a baffling place. There are so many organisations working at strategic and managerial levels across the museum and heritage one may quite legitimately suggest that, while there is certainly a lot of broth, there are perhaps a few too many cooks.
One might ask how many quangos, directives, strategic reviews and government agencies do we need to run a succesful arts sector.
I’ve worked in the museum sector since 2001 and have, over that time, now built up a reasonable knowledge of who does what at a strategic level in the UK. But as a supplier to the sector it must be very confusing to see all these organisations out there. Do you know your AIM from your ACE. Or your DCMS from your HLF?
I wrote a piece recently for Museum [Insider] which reviews the top organisations (and their many acronyms) and provides an overview of who’s who.
Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland is presently undergoing a major piece of restoration work. They’ve not only decided to revisit the stonework of this charming building (built 1446), but also to make it fit for the future by conserving the building, reworking the roof and other facilities on site. And there’s going to be a brand new all-singing, all-dancing visitor centre there too. There’s more in a recent piece on Museum [Insider], as per norm.
If this project is going to be indicative of where I spend time on the Internet, it had probably also include facebook. Having disabled facebook scrabble (a source of much happiness to me, but not at all conducive to the life of a writer) I now spend a lot less time on the site. Face book never ceases to amaze with what it can throw up. Let’s see what happens when I search for happiness:
Happiness – nearly 60,000 people have signed up to be fans of happiness. They say: ‘what is better than a true emotion that we can express through smiles and laughter. nothing. we have pages for our favourite artists and stores, but what about our favourite emotion?’
Cyanide & Happiness – a visual artist with an interest in comics and superheros with nearly 80,000 fans. You can read their peculiar comic blog here (not on facebook).
HAPPINESS – a positivity movement with 68,000 fans. They say: ‘Happiness is a Choice! Let’s make this world a better place by choosing to be happy and making the people around us happy. Let’s spread the Love and the Good Vibes!’
Happiness Nki Nwaokolo – a personal profile. She lives in London and supports Manchester United. (I haven’t posted a link as I don’t want to think we’re stalking her!)
Happiness – a group for sharing happiness. They say: ‘Just add pictures of happy things, or things that make you happy!’ They have 6,000 fans.
As part of this week’s mini-investigation into what the we can find on the web when we search for happiness, I turned my attention to the online version of the listings and review magazine Time Out. I have confined the interview research part of my happiness project to people living and working in the UK at the moment, so I’ve just searched Time Out London. What will our nation’s capital have in store in terms of happiness …
A review of a London bar called Trailer Happiness in Kensington. They give it four stars out of five. They describe it as ‘tongue in cheek decor matched with a serious attitude to booze’.
The 2002 movie Waiting for Happiness is currently being shown in London. (Although Time Out couldn’t tell me where or when. I’m sure I could find it if I looked hard enough.)
The Tristan Bates Theatre in WC2H is showing a play called Whispering Happiness until this Saturday. (Starts 7.30pm, tickets £13)
And that was it. Only three things to make us happy in London this week. Still, it’s quite a good mix of results.
Many of us carry a little bit of the Apple corporation around with us each day. But do we ever listen to music relating to happiness? I know I do, but that’s because I download lots of songs with the H-word in the title. Here’s a quick flick through the results when I searched for happiness.
Happiness (Kasabian) 2009
Happiness (Goldfrapp) 2008
Happiness (Orson) 2006
Happiness (The Fray) 2009
Happiness (Sound De-Zign) 2009
Also featured down the list are The Pointer Sisters, Ken Dodd, Will Young, Robert Palmer, Macy Gray, Teenage Fanclub and Divine Comedy.
There are at least 100 tracks simply called happiness, and many thousands with happiness in the title. Bob Dylan chose his favourite songs with happiness for the BBC a few months ago, which I wrote about on this website.
